Career Warrior Podcast #287) Who to Connect With on LinkedIn

Episode Transcript

Chris Villanueva 0:04
Welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast. If your goal is to transition to more meaningful work, achieve better pay or reach that flow state at work. This is your podcast. I am Chris Villanueva the founder of Let’s Eat, Grandma, the world’s best resume writing service. You can connect with me by following me on LinkedIn, just make sure to send me a personalized connection request, letting me know why you subscribe to the show, I do want to give a quick shout out to somebody who did just that. They said, I’ve been updating my professional game after a recent layoff from an unsuccessful post merger endeavor. I stumbled onto your podcast and I’m really enjoying it. You’ve got a new subscriber over here in Houston. Thanks for doing what you do, and all the best. Thank you so much to all of those who are connecting with me on LinkedIn and letting me know feedback on the show. It means a lot to me. My number one goal is to provide value to you and to help you to move your job search forward.

Okay, so let’s get started with the show here. We’re talking about who to connect with on LinkedIn. When I’ve talked to people about LinkedIn, this is naturally one of the first questions that come to mind will consider the crazy statistic that 35 point 5 million people have been hired by one of their LinkedIn connections. This is huge for the job search world and LinkedIn. As I’ve said in past episodes is getting bigger and bigger. LinkedIn is big in my own life. And one thing you’ll notice if you connect with me on LinkedIn is that I’m not this major influencer with 30,000 connections. And whenever I post, I don’t get 1000 likes, I mean, typically, I get anywhere between five to 40. But I’ve gotten some major success from LinkedIn. And it’s helped move things forward in my own life. I’ve gotten speaking opportunities, customers, and a good portion of my podcast guests, a lot of these folks have come from LinkedIn. And many of the clients who do update their profiles and are active with LinkedIn, get jobs that they otherwise would not have gotten without their LinkedIn updates and activity. And these folks aren’t influencers either. A lot of these clients that we’ve gotten have just been barely getting started with LinkedIn and gotten some good success. So what we’ll do is I’ll dive into three different types of folks you should connect with on LinkedIn to get that success. And if you do this consistently, and let’s just say quality, not quantity, like I said, I don’t have a billion connections, I have quality connections, then you’ll see similar success as well. The first type of person you should connect with on LinkedIn are industry or professional connections you come across in real life.

So in 2022, I attended a conference called Sherm, it is actually the world’s largest HR conference, and I went to a talk at seven o’clock in the morning. No, I typically don’t like to talk much first thing in the morning, but I did have my cup of coffee, ended up shaking hands with someone by the name of Jennifer McClure. She was actually a keynote presenter for the conference. And unbeknownst to me, she was sitting right next to me and was going to give a presentation the next day. So I said, at the end of our exchange, let’s connect on LinkedIn, because you never know where these things can go. And a few messages later, she became one of my next podcast guests, since it’s such an amazing person who was, you know, dynamic world traveler, who went all pretty much pretty much all over the globe to deliver these keynote speeches. And she just did this amazing job speaking on her podcast, and we’re still connected to this day. And I give this example, because folks you meet in real life often have the best engagement when you’re deciding to take things online afterwards. So one of the things you can say at the end of your real life conversation, is I really loved our chat, can we connect on LinkedIn, and then make sure to send that personalized connection requests in open up with something that you talked about during that real life conversation? Of course, your goal isn’t always to get a transaction or something out of it. This person ended up being a great podcast guest Yes. But there was a good organic conversation before that, that really led up to this further engagement. So keep an open mind, go out there and meet people who are within your industry within your field, and continue to connect with them and see how you can learn from these folks.

All right. The second type of person that will recommend that you connect with on LinkedIn are past and present colleagues and managers, past and present colleagues or managers. I will never forget the awkwardness I felt when I saw that my ex boss was viewing my LinkedIn profile. I had the premium feature so of course you can see who looks at your profile and then I was like, Oh my gosh,

My ex boss saw my profile they, they know all my secrets. But I do recommend connecting with these folks in order to keep the door open. Why are past and present colleagues and managers great opportunities for your LinkedIn profile? Well, for one, these folks are probably more than happy to engage with your profile, whenever you post something, they will see your posts and make a comment or a like message or something like that to create that further engagement. And I thought this is well put on our blog, which says, besides the dopamine hit whenever a first degree contact reshares comments on or likes your content, it appears on their homepage along with the homepage of your second and third degree connections. So in a nutshell, these folks are likely to engage with your profile. It also opens the door for recommendations and endorsements, which are some of the most powerful ways to boost your profile for results. You can tout your accomplishments all day. And that’s a good thing to do. But when other people endorse you, or let the world know you have such and such skills, then this is one of the best ways to boost and beef up your profile so you can get more interviews. So don’t be shy connect with especially those current colleagues when you’re standing on good terms to create that better engagement on your profile.

The third type of person you should connect with on LinkedIn are drumroll please, recruiters, recruiters are some of the best people you should connect with on LinkedIn. And this should really come as no surprise that these are good folks to connect with. But did you know that 97% of recruiters are using the platform to find top talent among the 52 million job seekers on the site. I’ll link an article that shows you how you can connect with a recruiter like the best way to do that. But the gist of it is that you can type in a targeted keyword such as the position you’re gunning for, and type in the word recruiter. To find recruiters, it sounds dumb, simple, but LinkedIn makes it really easy to access a certain type of professional and recruiters are no exception. And again, make sure quality not quantity is your game, I know you’re gonna want to try to reach out to every recruiter in the world. But when you are connecting with these folks, make sure that you create engagement. Don’t just say I want a job, can you provide me a job even though they’ll they’ll probably be open to that because it’s kind of their job to find talent. But make sure you show that you are a professional within your industry who is really moving forward and wanting to make progress. You want to do things such as post in your profile and update your profile to show recruiters that you are actively engaged. So, so far, we have three great connections, three great types of people to connect with on LinkedIn, it’s industry professional connections you come across in real life, it is past and present colleagues and managers. And the third type of person, as a recruiter, I’ll give two bonus types of people to connect with. And number one would be your dream company or people who work at your dream company. This is a great way obviously to be forward seeking. And even if you hadn’t made a particular career transition yet, this is a really, really low hanging fruit here an easy way to start to get in the loop for your future job. And the other bonus type of person to connect with is career influencers. This is an underrated one. But these are great fault great folks to follow that can offer you both education, and inspiration and even entertainment sometimes, when it comes to moving your career forward. Obviously, I’ve been saying it over and over again. But you should be following yours truly. But there are a few other ones I would recommend who are past podcast guest of mine. This includes Maya Grossman, Jennifer McClure, who was the person I told the story about at the beginning of this episode, Diana y k, chan and Austin Bell sack, make sure to follow these folks. And in no time you will have the encouragement and the knowledge needed to move your career forward.

In closing, I will say set a goal for yourself. Is it five new connections you want to make per day on LinkedIn? Or is it five new connections per week? The pace is up to you and really there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s just up to you to decide how many quality connections you’re going to make to on LinkedIn. And just stick to that goal. Guys, I know it’s really hard to stay consistent. But set a calendar event on your on your Gmail calendar every single day and remember to stick to your engagement strategy on LinkedIn.Of course I will link all the different resources are mentioned within this episode including how to find recruiters on LinkedIn and how to build LinkedIn connections. I’ll also include a past episode with Tom pounder we talked about basically who

To connect with him on LinkedIn, he also really hammers home the quality versus quantity thing. So make sure to check that out. That’s episode 46 of the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. I will see you next time. Hi, I’m so grateful for all of you who subscribe and go out and be warriors.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai